Earth Etude for Elul 7 - So Many Ways to Repair the World

by Mirele B. Goldsmith

The reality of climate change and other environmental problems weigh on me all year long. But as Yom Kippur approaches my thoughts turn more and more to my own responsibility. During this past year did I do enough? Was I effective in what I did? And most troubling of all, did I make the right choices about where to invest my efforts?

An answer to this question came to me this summer when I participated in the Green Attica Conference. The conference was convened by Patriarch Bartholomew, leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church, who is known as the “Green Patriarch” for his commitment to environmental protection. The participants were clergy, scientists, politicians, teachers, business leaders, and activists. Each one inspired me; Kalliope Stara, a graduate student who is leading a campaign against fracking in Greece; Christiana Figueres, who led the process that culminated in the Paris Agreement on climate change; Maude Barlow, who has championed the human right to water; and many others.

Photo credit: Sean Hawkey/WCC

Reflecting on the experience of meeting so many wonderful people, each one working to protect creation in their own way, I found the answer to my question. Each of us has a unique contribution to make in the effort to protect the earth and its inhabitants and all of these contributions are essential. There are many “right choices.”

As Ben Zoma teaches, “Who is wise? The one who learns from everyone.” (Avot 4:1) As the new year begins, I have resolved to keep learning from those around me about the many ways there are to repair our world. I will stop worrying about whether I am doing the right thing, and instead focus on doing more of what I can do best.

Dr. Mirele B. Goldsmith is an environmental psychologist, educator, and activist. Mirele founded Jews Against Hydrofracking, directed the Jewish Greening Fellowship, and was a leader in the People’s Climate March and Jewish Climate Action Network-NYC. Mirele’s writing has been published by the Jewish Week, Forward, Shma, and Huffington Post. 

Earth Etude for Elul 6 - Once Upon a Time I Had a Garden

by Rabbi Peg Kershenbaum

Once upon a time I had a garden. I must have been inspired by reading The Good Earth to plunge a spade into the unyielding, aptly named, Rockland soil. But, after moving rocks, boulders and many less natural obstacles, I protected the small plot and planted tomatoes, cucumbers, Brussels sprouts and 5 slender corn seedlings. As the spring turned to summer and blossoms turned to the beginnings of identifiable vegetables, I realized that I was going to share the bounty with a pudgy and persistent woodchuck, some opportunistic rabbits, ravening squirrels and brazen crows. This was the year before the deer.

One day, in the breezy part of the afternoon, as the old story goes, I was working in the garden, trying to replace the cucumber’s chewed-off leaves with paper plates so the little plants wouldn’t die of sunstroke. I jumped to hear a shush-shush behind me. A snake? An intrepid rabbit? I turned in every direction but saw nothing. The sound came again! I turned to face the corn stalks, now healthy and about 4 feet tall. Again the sound, but this time I saw its source: the corn was growing before my eyes, calling attention to its progress with the merest of sighs! Corn talks.

The other vegetables remained silent, but the cucumbers definitely responded to my efforts to save them. I’m not a very good gardener, but I am tenderhearted. I was moved by the quiet conversation. Nature responded tentatively to even my poor ministrations. How much the more would it respond to careful treatment? How much of a difference could be made by finding and supporting environmental organizations that really knew what they were doing and that inspired many individuals to join in the effort to care for gardens, forests, mountains, streams, the sky and the air!

I’d like to say that my thoughts led to action and that I spend my days and nights working to protect and improve the planet. No, I’m not an outdoors activist. I don’t even have a garden any more. But I listen more carefully to the natural world, give what I can give, conserve what I can, try to act responsibly and tread a bit more gently on this earth. My ears are attuned to environmentalists although their voices don’t whisper like the corn. My words bring their words to others in an encouraging way, I hope. My gratitude, like that of my long-ago cucumbers, is for those who work to save this earth and who inspire others to do what they can, too. And when the season turns to the end of garden harvesting and the New Year approaches, I remember the shush-shush of the corn, doing its best to grow in a difficult place. And I pray to be as determined as those stalks and as responsive as the cucumbers.

Peg Kershenbaum was ordained in 2008 by the Academy for Jewish Religion. She serves a small congregation of very dear people in Pocono Pines, PA.

Earth Etude for Elul 5 - In Regard to Feathers

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen

For many years I collected feathers. Walking along the trails, near my home or far away, whenever I spotted a feather, I brought it home. Together with rocks, shells, bits of wood, and other nature memorabilia, they helped to create a sense of the outdoors inside. The feathers meant a lot to me.

Then one day, while trying to identify a feather my granddaughter had found, I stumbled inadvertantly across a government website with information about feathers.

I learned that it is illegal in the United States to collect feathers.

The reason for this law regarding all feathers is to protect migratory and endangered birds from being killed in order to collect and sell their feathers.

I was devastated. All these years, I'd been breaking the law. Suddenly my collection of feathers became more complicated.

My grandchildren love those feathers, but I explained to them what I had learned. My granddaughter, aged 6, suggested that maybe we could keep just a few.

For months I struggled with what to do. And I stopped picking up feathers. I still saw them, but I left them beside the trail.

At first it was painful to leave them behind. I felt deprived. But over time, as a plan of what to do developed in my mind, it became easier to just notice the feathers and leave them be. And instead of picking them up, I took a picture to take home with me.

This summer, I took my grandchildren and the feathers to one of my favorite trails near my home. I let them each pick out three or four of their favorites to keep. The remainder we returned to their home, the natural world. We made sure to hide them, so someone else wouldn't pick them up.

That trail now holds a special magic for me, for I know that treasures are hidden out of site along the way. It gives extra meaning to walking there.

And in the meantime, I stopped photographing the feathers. They are now just something ephemeral for me to hold in my mind's eye for as long as they will remain. They are one more gift from the sacred space of the more-than-human world. They are a prayer, a connection, an unspoken message for me to carry in my heart.

T'shuvah has happened.

Rabbi Katy Allen is the founder and rabbi of Ma'yan Tikvah - A Wellspring of Hope, which holds services outdoors all year long, and the co-founder and President pro-tem of the Boston-based Jewish Climate Action Network. She is a board certified chaplain and serves as an Eco-Chaplain and the Facilitator of One Earth Collaborative, a program of Open Spirit, and is a former hospital and hospice chaplain. She received her ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, NY in 2005 and lives in Wayland, MA, with her spouse, Gabi Mezger, who leads the singing at Ma'yan Tikvah.

Earth Etude for Elul 4 - Finding Quiet for Reflection

by Hazzan Shoshana Brown

Although Psalm 130 can be recited all year long, it is especially appropriate for the season of introspection and repentance, speaking as it does of waiting and watching for the dawn. I have chosen photos that look up to the hills "out of the depths," as the psalmist says, and also out at the sea, or at the early moments of the rising sun, or at its setting. They are mostly lonely pictures, since it is in quiet and reflection that we search our souls, but since we are often most aware of God when we behold God's beauty in creation, I have chosen moments that moved me in their beauty. These photos were all taken in the Continental U.S., and range from Maine to North Carolina to California. One photo is of a valley in Yosemite (whispering to us of one of my heroes, John Muir), and another is from the path around Walden Pond (evoking another hero, Henry David Thoreau) – and two are from Long Island, which makes me think of a third hero, Woody Guthrie, who wrote "this land was made for you and me." Most of the year I hike within 40 minutes of my home in Southeastern Massachusetts and along the coast of Rhode Island (right next door). We do not have to travel far to either search our souls or to find beauty...we just have to devote the time and seriousness to the search and to the care that they deserve.

As you to listen to my arrangement of Psalm 130, which is based on the traditional melody for the piyyut Ohilah la El, and scroll through the photos, may they inspire you to find your own spots for soul searching.

Psalm 130 (tr. by Shoshana Brown)

A Song of Ascent

From out of the depths I cry to You, Adonai:

Adonai, hear now my voice -

Be attentive to my prayers, to the voice of my supplication!

If you kept count of every sin, Adonai, who could stand before You?

But there is forgiveness with You, and so we revere You.

I wait, Adonai, my soul waits - with hope I wait for God’s word.

My soul waits for Adonai more eagerly than watchmen wait for the dawn.

Put your hope in Adonai, Israel, for Adonai is generous with mercy.

Abundant is God’s power to redeem;

Indeed, God will redeem the people Israel from all their sins.

Hazzan Shoshana Brown serves as cantor and co-spiritual leader (along with her husband, Rabbi Mark Elber) at Temple Beth El, in Fall River, MA. Hazzan Brown combines her love of singing and spiritual leadership by serving as cantor, and her love of nature and writing by writing monthly hiking articles for the Fall River Herald News. She loves that her assignments for the newspaper have made her get out in nature and also led her to learn a great deal about the unique ecosystems of Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Recently, Hazzan Brown has added nature photography to her satchel.

Earth Etude for Elul 3 - Environmental Etude

by Rabbi Sam Yolen

At this point in time, to write something about the environment has to be more of a “in commemoration of” than a “dedicated to” exercise. We’ve been standing at the juncture of run-away environmental change for longer than I can remember, and the patience of the Earth to absorb our species’ immaturity has indeed turned into vengeance. From fracking the Earth’s crust to clear cutting forests, we’ve done things that most ancient cultures would find unfathomable -- real crimes against the future of humanity. The biblical truth that sinful blood can poison the land may be much for our modern sensitivities, yet ecologists are raising the same spiritual concerns: that our actions have polluted the land beyond repair. As the Bible warns us, this pollution is held longer than the third and fourth generations.

It is in these dire scientific observations that I ruminate on my place in the order of the world. Specifically: What qualifications does humankind have to be stewardship of the Earth? If you ask the Bible, it would be an explicit promise made to Adam, “Master the earth.” If you ask an evolutionary biologist, the simple qualification for dominion over the Earth is a voice box and opposable thumbs. We are a species with a brain less evolved than many other animals, our only difference is our ability to make tools. And to coordinate our behavior.

I write this etude to the environment acknowledging that my computer is the my tool. Technology such as this computer would have been impossible to create if not for the vast quantity of precious resources and the many trained experts who invested in a supply chain larger than my ability to conceptualize. I pray that the effects of my own actions, my diet, my transportation, my lifestyle, this very computer that I write on, are in some way redeemable to a higher power. My work on Earth is meaningful if I struggle to put meaning into it - while being aware of the messy arrangements of my sustenance, I pray that I give more love than I take in. I pray that the future we share together on this planet is never bereft of joy.

Famous biblical commentators interpret environmental responsibility in a more modern way. Rashi explains that if we warrant creation, we are allowed to master it. If we don’t warrant it, we destroy it. And the uniquely human dilemma of knowing something is wrong, but being incapable to solve it individually, is ironic. It’s also quite refreshingly prophetic. How many Jewish Bible heroes rally criticism on Biblical Israel, knowing full well their warnings fall on deaf ears? That their purpose and mission is a futile one? Man plans and God laughs.

In regards to the stifling inertia of progress, the real purpose of the modern ecological prophet is to bear witness. To hold the emotions that others cannot. To recognize that individuals may be trapped in their rational mind, incapable of perceiving truth because it is a meditation on destruction that is just too hard to intellectualize. We must be compassionate to that. And still, we must not run from the light, but face it with integrity. This is our mess, and these are our sacred stories. If there needs to be a Bible, then there needs to be an environment to sustain it.

In the name of God, as we turn our poetry from “Dedicated to Nature,” to “In memory of Nature” we are practicing the sacred art of intercession. We are continuing the holy tradition that pleads with God and humanity: postpone the our species punishment for the Holocene extinction. At least imbue our species with a brain large enough to break the fall from grace we are witnessing. Restore us to the days of old. Maybe so far back that we remember your promise in the Garden of Eden

And if the world of tomorrow still contains joy, all the witnessing in the world will be worth it.

Earth Etude for Elul 2 - Twilight

by Carol C. Reiman

Sky still blue,

Eyes still brown--

Colors 

Fading.

Leaf veins branch,

Hand veins thin--

Skin 

Cascading.

What time we have;

Have we time--

To laugh in sync,

While eyes dim.

Leaves dry,

Sweep away;

Book of Life

Unfurls pages.

Where the path?

Circling, thin,

Narrowing

As the fog sets in.

The blue,

The eyes,

Change color,

Go.

The sun

Goes on

Beyond

Our line

Of sight.

To other

Realms

In other

Forms.

Our day,

Our year,

Teaching,

Thought

All

Turn...

Carol C. Reiman is out of library work into retirement in the Boston area, engaged by cats, dogs, and human animals, heavily involved in mother care, searching for balance.

Earth Etude for Elul 1 - A Pilgrimage to Honor the Earth

by Rabbi Moshe Givental

Over a decade ago now, I was sitting in a Parshah HaShavua (weekly Torah Portion) class and my teacher asked the following question: Why are human beings called ADAM in our holy Torah? ADAMAH, after all, is our Hebrew word for the Earth. So ADAM would mean something like Earth-ling. However, human beings are no more from the earth than any other life on our majestic planet. When we name something, we pick a name to highlight some unique quality of that being before us. Names are not chosen at random. Rabbi Yehoshua Karsh then paused for a  moment. Then he continued, perhaps we were named thus, because we are the only beings on this blue ball in the sky, who have the capacity to forget that we are, of the earth, depend on the Earth, part of and partners with the Earth.

Indeed, it seems, that humanity has long ago forgotten that we are ADAM - part the Earth/ADAMAH, of her eco-systems, or her aliveness, and of the habitat as a whole which makes our lives and civilization possible. How else do we explain undermining our very own habitat by putting poisons in the earth, water, and air, hunting species to extinction, and displacing entire eco-systems? Perhaps the ways in which we use and abuse our Earth, and all of her aliveness, is even similar to the way in which we use and abuse each other, and anyone we think of as "other."

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a book entitled, God in Search of Man, where he pleaded that even more than humanity searches for God, God yearns and waits for humanity to find God. So too, perhaps, ADAMAH is yearning and waiting for us to return to a sane and healthy relationship with her, and all the life which depends upon her. This is a yearning for us to remember that all creation is sacred, that everything and everyone needs to be treated with the care and dignity that is appropriate for them. This is a need for humanity to understand the consequences of our environmental destruction and climate disruption, and correct our course.

The issue before us is not environmentalism or animal rights, in the sense of ethical demands to take care of animals or the Earth. The issue is those things AND self-preservation, because the extent to which we have disrupted Earth's eco-systems are coming back as a clear and present danger to us humans along with all life. To begin to integrate this reality requires a paradigm shift of Copernican scale. While the might of humanity is powerful, we are neither at the center of the universe, nor at the center of nature. We are a part of the Universe and nature, and the consequences of our destructive actions are "coming home to roost."

Rabbi Moshe Givental is a graduate of Hebrew College Rabbinical School. He's walking a Pilgrimage to Honor the Earth as this being published, walking from Boston to Detroit. You can learn more about him and his work at www.MosheGivental.com and www.facebook.com/pilgrimagerabbi.

A Book of Etudes

Shalom!

If you've been following this blog for any time, you know about the Earth Etudes for Elul, reflections on t'shuvah and Earth for the month leading up to the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe.

Elul is a time for reflection, a time for t'shuvah, of turning and re-turning to G!d and to our best selves. It is time for heshbon hanefesh, examining our hearts and souls. We may ask ourselves: What have I done? What do I wish I had done? How have I changed? What do I hope to be and do in the future? How did I impact my loved ones? The world? How do I want to impact them? Elul is the time for us to begin to make atonement for the things we wish we had or hadn't done, and to renew ourselves, to do all we can to get ourselves to change.

Elul is a time to turn away from the ways in which we have missed the mark, to make restitution as needed, and to return to our best selves. It is a time to be reborn, transformed, and renewed. It is also a time of love and caring. The letters of the month’s name come from the verse, “Ani l'dodi, v'dodi li–I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine” (Song of Songs 6:3). Elul is a time of building better relationships with our beloveds–with each other, with G!d, and with the Earth.

This year's new set of etudes will begin on 1 Elul, the evening of August 11. We hope you will enjoy them again this year.

To further enhance your Elul reflections this year, we invite you to purchase a book of etudes -Earth Etudes for Elul: Spiritual Reflections for the Season, is now available in paperback and as an ebook. It contains many of the reflections written over the past seven years for this blog by a variety of writers.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of The Shalom Center, says about the book, 

Jewish contemplations of the Earth. Rather, human contemplations through a lens of experience that was/is Jewish. Rather, contemplations not of earth herself but of the bond between earth and her myriad earthlings, humans and frogs and redwoods and hippopotami, honeybees and rivers, icebergs wailing as they melt, coral reefs shrieking as they die. Each contemplation is worth an hour’s meditation, even a day if you will set aside the time to read it quietly – just one -- and then listen to the still silent voice of interbreathing Earth.

Rabbi Jeff Hoffman, Rabbi-in-Residence at the Academy for Jewish Religion in NY says about it: 

Rabbi Katy Z. Allen’s Earth Etudes for Elul is the perfect companion for all who desire to walk the path of t’shuvah (return/repentance) during the period leading up to the turning of the Jewish year in the fall. It uniquely links timeless Jewish wisdom to what we now know to be our generation’s primary concern: “climate disruption and environmental degradation” as Rabbi Allen puts it. These Etudes are filled with grace, lyricism, hope, and inspiration. They will enhance the experience of all who seek true t’shuvah, and will contribute to the healing of our beloved earth.

And Rabbi Jill Hammer, author of A Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Days, says: 

Like a forest landscape, Earth Etudes for Elul offers a variety of views of the earth as a sacred place: a home to be preserved, a living being who deserves our care and teshuvah, a focus for prayer and inspiration.  Many spiritual leaders have offered their personal reflections, theological conclusions, and activist aspirations regarding the natural world, in brief essays that can be used as meditations for Elul, the month of returning, when we prepare for the High Holy Days and for committing to a better life.  In this age of human excess, our process of teshuvah/repentance should surely engage the earth as well as at one another—Earth Etudes for Elul provides a needed opportunity to repair our relationship to the planet on which we live

Click here to purchase from the publisher, or here to purchase the ebook and here to purchase the paperback from Amazon, and enjoy!

Thanks so much for your ongoing interest and support,
Rabbi Katy

Rabbi Katy Allen is the founder and rabbi of Ma'yan Tikvah - A Wellspring of Hope, which holds services outdoors all year long, and the co-founder and President pro-tem of the Boston-based Jewish Climate Action Network. She is a board certified chaplain and serves as an Eco-Chaplain and the Facilitator of One Earth Collaborative, a program of Open Spirit, and is a former hospital and hospice chaplain. She received her ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, NY in 2005 and lives in Wayland, MA, with her spouse, Gabi Mezger, who leads the singing at Ma'yan Tikvah.

All that’s Holy – D’var Torah on Acharei-Mot/Kedoshim

by Cantor Shoshana Brown 

“In the name of all that’s holy” is a phrase we may hear thrown around these days In the online “Urban Dictionary” it is explained as: 

An exclamation generally spoken in exasperation or as a plea.

But what is“holiness”? What does it mean for something – or someone– to be “holy”? This week’s Torah portion is a double one,Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, covering chapters 16-20 in the book of Vayikra (Leviticus). My intention here is to focus on one section of this double-portion, namely chapters 19 and 20, which deal intensively with the idea of living in a way that is “holy,” and also somehow in a way that is like God, for in this section’s introduction God says:

You shall be holy, for I, Adonai your God, am holy. (19:2);

And elsewhere God says:

You shall sanctify yourselves, and be holy, for I am Adonai your God; you shall faithfully observe my statutes, and do them; I am Adonai your God.” (20:7-8)

And finally, toward the end of this section God says:

You shall be holy to me, for I, Adonai, am holy, and I have set you apart from other peoples to be mine.  (20:26)

Throughout this section, the various prescriptions for how God would have us behave are punctuated with, “Ani Adonai Eloheikhem” – I am Adonai your God.

Before I go on, I want to skip back briefly to the beginning of this double-portion, just to remind you that Chapter 16 of Leviticus, the beginning of Acharei Mot, is also the Torah portion that is read on the morning of Yom Kippur, most often thought of as the “holiest” day of the Jewish year, where it describes the High Priest going in to the Holy of Holies to make the great atonement sacrifice that, hopefully, would restore whatever might be out of whack in the relationship between God and the Jewish people for the coming year.

But we are just going round and round the word…we still do not know what it means to be, or to act “holy.” And, beyond God’s very being, aren’t there things, or times, or phenomena that are “holy” that have nothing to do with the Jewish people, or perhaps even with human beings at all?

Somehow, the Torah writer/s expect us to know what “holy” means, without it ever being truly defined. But in chapters 19 and 20 of Vayikrawe are given some examples:

You shall each revere your mother and your father, and keep My Sabbaths: I am Adonai your God.(19:3)

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am Adonai your God. (19: 9-10)

You shall not defraud your fellow. You shall not commit robbery. The wages of a laborer shall not remain with you until morning.

You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind. You shall revere your God: I am Adonai.  (19: 13-14)

You shall not hate your brother in your heart; reprove your brother, but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against one of your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am Adonai. (19:17-18)

When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I am Adonai your God.(19:33-34)

These are just a few of my favorite examples, but lest you think that these are more “aspirational” than anything really definite, we hear, immediately after this admirable instruction about how to treat the “stranger” (another word for a non-Israelite immigrant in the land of Israel), words about weights and measures in the marketplace:

You shall not falsify measures of length, weight, or capacity. You shall have an honest balance, honest weights, an honest ephah[similar to a bushel] and an honesthin[similar to a gallon]. (19:35)

We often hear a person say: “he (or she) is a good person.” But through the eyes of God, as imagined at least by the author of Leviticus, this is not some vague notion, but something very concrete:  Did he leave the gleanings of his field for the poor and the immigrant? Did she pay her help at the day’s end? Did he take advantage of some person’s or group’s ignorance to harm them (putting a stumbling block before the blind)? Did the Israelite community treat immigrants according to the same laws as its citizens? Did you love both your fellow Israelite and the stranger in your land as yourself? In business, were all your accounts, all your measures and practices fair and honest, no cutting corners, no overcharging? These are very concrete measures of what it means to be, not just a “good person,” but “holy.” 

And yet I, and many of you as well, I suspect, do not like the word “holy” as applied to human beings. We think of the insulting phrase, “holier than thou” – a phrase which we use to disparagingly describe someone who hypocritically thinks he or she is so much better than all the rest of us, when in fact they are annoying to us both because of their haughtiness and usually because of some other glaring flaw that they do not see (perhaps selfishness or greediness, not necessarily something unlawful, but certainly unbecoming).

And it is confusing for God to maintain that God has set apart the people of Israel from all other peoples for God’s own (it sounds a lot like the phrase that the groom says to a bride under the chuppah: “harei at m’kudeshet li” – “You are sanctified to me”)…how can any group of people be “made holy”? God never could get the Israelites to behave as God wanted them to – God threatened many times to wipe them all out, God was so frustrated with them. So clearly being “holy” cannot be a permanent state of being – not for people, at any rate.

Earlier in the Torah, in the instructions about the rituals of the priests, the word “holy” is used for many ritual objects, or for meat or blood or oil or other things that get sanctified in the course of the sacrificial rituals. This usage does not seem to have anything to do with ethical behavior-rather these categories of “holiness” have to do with what scholars of religion call the “numinous” – that sort of supernatural-extra-terrestrial category that the rational mind cannot wholly comprehend.

But clearly, the passages that I read you from Leviticus 19 dohave everything to do with ethical behavior. And they also have to do with love- or rather, with compassion – feeling towards your fellow human being what it might be to be in his or her shoes, and treating him/her the way you would want to be treated. Not because you like him. You might, or you might not. And not simply because God tells you to. But because you are a human being, and you know what it feels like to be cold, or hungry, or have your wages withheld, or be treated as less than a person with the full rights of a citizen.

And now I am going to go out on a limb of sorts. I feel that in our day, we need to adopt another category of what we call “holy.” And this is a combination of the two previously-mentioned categories: something that is “numinous” in that it is related to God’s plan going all the way back to Creation and the Big Bang, irrespective of human beings; and it is also related to our behavior– how we treat this earth and our fellow creatures that inhabit this planet alongside us.

If God were to reveal an updated Torah to us today, perhaps God would tell us:

Revere the earth, the water, the mountains, the seas, and the air which I gave you to breathe. In your need to utilize the earth’s resources to live, do not cause them undo damage, harming my intricate and varied ecosystems which harbor multitudes of life which you are not even aware of.

I am Adonai your God, the Creator and sustainer of all.

In your need to stay warm, and to travel about to do your business, do not wantonly harm My soil, spill toxins into My waters, release gases which belong under the earth into the air – for in doing so you will destroy the good earth which I have given you to live on, and you will forfeit your own lives and the lives of your children and grandchildren.

I am Adonai your God, the Creator and sustainer of all.

All this I have created is holy, it may be useful to you, but it is beyond your ken. The whole earth was not created for you. You are but a part of the whole. It was created for its own sake, to be holy to Me. You must strive to live, and yes, prosper, without undue disturbance of my other creatures. Remember that they too want to live and prosper; you are just a creature of the earth alongside them. Be amazed by them; they are holy to Me.

Do not hoard. Do not be greedy – it will not prolong your life one day.

Always keep in mind the health of the planet for the sake of your children and their children after them – choosing life for those who come after you – that is the way of holiness. Be holy for I am holy. I am Adonai your God, the Creator and sustainer of all.

Hazzan Shoshana Brown serves as cantor and co-spiritual leader (along with her husband, Rabbi Mark Elber) at Temple Beth El, in . Shoshana grew up in , and once wanted to be a writer - but also a forest ranger! Now in , Shoshana combines her love of singing and spiritual leadership by serving as cantor, and her love of nature and writing by writing monthly hiking articles for the Fall River Herald News. Shoshana loves that her assignments for the newspaper have made her get out in nature through all the months of the year, and also led her to learn a great deal about the unique ecosystems of Southeastern Massachusetts and . Recently, Shoshana has added nature photography to her satchel, and that has increased her desire to get out even more!

What Will Happen to G!d?

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen

I have often asked myself 

a seemingling unanswerable question.

Often, I have wondered,

What will happen to G!d,

in the not-so-distant future,

when all of us earthlings

will have perished,

when, as a result of our plundering

of this precious Earth,

we will have gone the way of the dodo bird

and the passenger pigeon?

What will happen to G!d?

I have wondered out loud,

and I have pondered in the quiet of my heart.

With the Torah or the Talmud open before me,

their ancient black letters

speaking to me from the past,

I have wondered.

In the woods alone,

among the trees and beside the water,

watching the sunset,

listening to geese,

I have wondered,

What will happen to G!d

when we earthlings are gone?

In the evening,

when the sun has set 

but the darkness we earthlings have banished hasn’t come,

I have wondered.

In the quiet of the night,

when many sleep

and few are listening

as a distant owl hoots,

I have wondered,

What will happen to G!d?

In the bustle of the city,

with cars and buses honking,

trains and trolleys rushing,

voices of many languages speaking,

accents expressing myriad thoughts,

people of every hue

purposefully, or aimlessly,

going about their business,

I have wondered,

What will happen to G!d

when we earthlings are gone,

our demise

the result of our plundering 

of this precious Earth?

As candles flicker before me,

welcoming a day of rest and celebration,

when my heart quiets after a week of work

and peace settles over my home,

I have wondered,

What will happen to G!d

when we earthlings are gone?

And every time, in every place,

the same answer has welled up within me,

every time

in every place

I have heard,

I have felt,

I have experienced,

the same answer.

G!d will endure.

G!d will survive.

G!d will always be.

Brokenhearted,

filled with grief,

but ever-resilent,. 

the Mystery,

the Spirit,

the Wonder

will abide,

never forgetting,

always remembering,

when we earthlings 

are gone.

Rabbi Katy Allen is the founder and rabbi of Ma'yan Tikvah - A Wellspring of Hope, which holds services outdoors all year long, and the co-founder and President pro-tem of the Boston-based Jewish Climate Action Network. She is a board certified chaplain and serves as an Eco-Chaplain and the Facilitator of One Earth Collaborative, a program of Open Spirit, and is a former hospital and hospice chaplain. She received her ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, NY in 2005 and lives in Wayland, MA, with her spouse, Gabi Mezger, who leads the singing at Ma'yan Tikvah.